This blog will be covering my attendance at the QCon 2011 conference in San Francisco, California from November 16 to 18. QCon is a software development conference on many useful topics which I will try my best to summarize through my posts. Please, feel free to post your comments and get some conversation started. Enjoy!

"regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did their best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his/her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."

What happens during retros - the 5 steps

Set the stage - getting ready (ex: create safety, I'm too busy)

Gather data - the past (ex: artifacts contest, Timeline)

Generate insigths - now (ex: fish-bone, 5 whys, patterns and shifts)

Decide what to do - the future (ex: Making the magic happen, SMART goals)

We should never impose retros on people not wanting retros... it never works!

There is a difference between retros and discussions at the cafeteria: for retros, you have (or need!) shared commitment to find solutions.

Serves to celebrate good things as well.

Serves as points to evaluate where we are going

Esther Derby's (Agile Retrospectivesauthor) findings

retros can be :

boring

painful (ex: finger-pointing) to the point people want to stop them

those 2 issues come from a lack of :

focus

participation (thus the need to set the stage properly)

genuine insight (you can't only do start/stop/cont because they only show symptoms... what is the root cause behind the symptoms)

buy-in (takes a genuine facilitator - never the team leader - has to be neutral to the team, ideally from another team)

follow-through (followup is key otherwise, this is a lost of time)

More stories

30 minutes is the shortest retros possible (for a team that knows exactly what to do) - typically, minimum of an hour.

Finger pointing is a retrospective killer... a key to get out of this pattern is to change subject

Ground rules are really useful to put constraints on how retros are conducted (no naming no blaming rule for example - interpersonal issues shall not be addressed in retros but by management in parallel)

No naming, no blaming!

people, like kids, respond in much better ways to positive comments than negative comments. Negative comments leads to bad team work and eventually bad results! See the Prime directive again and how it actually helps with this essential ground rules.

Identify changes

It is not enough to reflect, you need to take actions to change things. Use SMART goal and name a responsible to follow up on each goal: